OK Not body parts…
Septic tanks have to be serviced every few years or they fail. But have you ever seen a septic tank have to be replaced? A septic tank of a party fraternity at a southern university? Well the stink was horrific, absolutely unimaginable. But what made it gross was the 20+ years of condoms in various states of decay. Poking out of black ooze from hell, some in day-glo colors. Quite festive.
When I worked at a mortuary, I went out to pick up a guy who had been declared DRT by the local coroner. Got there to find a 400 lb. dead fat man who was clad only in his briefs. He was also lying in a puddle of blood and urine. Seems he had fallen and bashed his head in on the corner of the coffee table. His bladder let go while he was lying there. His anal sphincter let go when we were wrestling him onto the stretcher. Also at the mortuary, I was detailed to take a stillborn baby out and bury him in his family plot. I wish I hadn’t opened that little white coffin and looked inside. Trivia: infant coffins are made from styrofoam and aren’t terribly different from really cheap ice chests.
As a volunteer fireman, I reported to the scene of a good many car accidents and saw people who had been burned, people who had been dismembered, or both.
At one of the residential treatment centers where I worked, we had a client who would defecate in his hand and throw it. He would also smear feces all over himself and his room.
Dead guy floating in a river. Turns out he had jumped 4 months earlier. Spring thaw is lovely, aint it?
Greek ferry line bathroom. Hole in the floor toilets are dandy on land, but not meant for rough seas.
Seconded.
My mom had leukemia. On her last day, her lungs had completely filled with fluid from the pneumonia she developed. Each gurgled breath was more disgusting than the one before. The fluid built up so much that it had nowhere to go, except out through her nose and mouth. These images are what nightmares are made of, when you can only stand helplessly by and watch life slowly slip away. Watching the death of a stranger is gross enough, I imagine. But I would wager that it pales in comparison with the wretchedness of standing vigil to the death of the woman who gave you life. The only comfort is that I know I will never have to witness that again.
Haven’t we had one of these threads before? Mine seem to pale in comparison with some of these others but here they are;
1a) There was the half of a dead puppy coming out of the momma dog’s vagina, which wasn’t quite as gross as the other half that she vomited up shortly after.
1b) The puppy halves were a bit grosser than the dog who vomited up an entire mouse (it had been swallowed whole, made me wonder if the thing had been wriggling around in there for a while). Since we must examine all things that come out of our patients for clues to their illness, several of us were staring at this dark blob for a while before we realized what it was. For some reason that’s when we could no longer tolerate the smell or the sight of it and we ran from the room. The slowest person gets stuck cleaning it up. It’s the law of the animal hospital.
There was the time we were helping people unload their dead collie from the back of their truck. They claimed it had just died a few hours before but this thing had been baking in the sun a while. It was bloated and it stank bad. We start to slide the stretcher under the animal and grab a handful of skin to pull it onto the stretcher (standard practice for getting animals on stretchers) and the skin pulled off. At this point I have to deal with the nasty smell and a gagging co-worker who’s threatening to vomit, and she meant it. We ran into the clinic with the stretcher and set the thing down and she ran off to the bathroom. I bagged it by myself because I knew if I had to see her gag one more time I would lose it.
There was the incident that combined 2 of the top gross out factors. A dog had an eye that was obviously dead and infected, it need to be removed. We get the dog anesthetized and prepped, the vet starts to cut and plop, it falls right out of the head, along with a wriggling mass of maggots. Eyeballs and maggots, ick. shudder
I did some electrical service work at a Funeral Home. The embalming room was the same room that held the electrical switchgear on which we were working.
I got to see several corpse preperation sessions.
One of which was a fellow of particular thick blood which the embalmer had a tough time extracting from the body. He had to use catheter type devices inserted in the body openings to get the blood clots from the veins in order to get the embalming fluid to circulate through the limbs.
You asked.
One other time;
I saw the body of a man that jumped off a hundred foot bridge laying on the ground face up. His legs were folded back behind his body at the hips and his feet were behind his shoulders. One arm was twisted and dislocated too.
Other than that he looked OK.
I had no idea the denizens of this board had witnessed so much grisly death, and it makes me more than mildlly glad that I haven’t.
Yargh! I should have known better and slapped a TMI warning on this thread…
…anyway, some of the things people have shared reminded me of a couple more things, although not mine, still good to tell.
-My SIL had just made herself a sandwich. Family cat jumps up on the table and nonchalantly blasts diarrhea all over the sandwich.
-One time when my aunt was a teenager my grandpa (her dad) had gone up North for a week. She came home from school one day to a…smell. She looked all over and couldn’t find anything so just tried to ignore it. Then she went to heat up some food in the microwave and…
My grandpa had apparently stuck an entire chicken in there to defrost it a day or so before he left and completely forgot about it (this sort of thing occurs sometimes with him). By now, the chicken was grey, gelatinous and moving , probably full of maggots and og knows what else. My aunt puked, grabbed the plate of zombie chicken, ran for the garbage, puked again in the sink on the way, tossed the whole thing in the garbage, and puked again on top of it. Fun times.
When I was seventeen, I was out on the river in my boat when the local fire department boat pulled alongside. One of my buddies, a volunteer fireman, asked me to join a search they were conducting for a floater that had been spotted by a fisherman. As luck would have it, I was the one who found him. We got a rope around him, kind of under his arms and across his chest, and I tied off the rope to a cleat on the side of the boat. His head lolled back and the corpse started gurgling and belching out water, and an eel came up out of his thoat and into the river. I still can’t look at an eel in a fish market without seeing that. ::shudder::
During Gulf War, Episode One, we came upon an Iraqi armored personnel carrier (APC) that had apparently been driving at night and went into a dug out tank emplacement (big hole in sand). The APC was tilted way onto it’s nose, and a bit sideways, rear half up in the air. The driver’s hatch was open and the deceased driver was still in the seat. He appeared to have a strange leg wound on his right thigh, but then we noticed the top half of his skull was basically missing, and the tissue that was supposed to be inside the skull had dripped onto the uniform leg. That and the crispy critters hanging out of tank hatches and the like.
When I lived in the boonies, I would ride the morning bus(it left at 5:30) into town for work. One of our fellow passengers was a man in his sixties with an artificial leg, who would takes a few minutes to get on the bus. One day I was running late and had to catch the next bus. Well, while approching the bus stop where this man normally caught the bus, we saw the lights of a police cars and a van pulled over the side. In the highway, lay the old man and his *artificial * leg was lying on the other side of the road. It seems he was late too and tried running across the highway in the dark to catch his bus and had been hit by a highspeed van. It was only a few minutes later did we realize that the leg we saw laying in the road *was his *other ** leg.
When I broke my arm. It was shaped like this: (top view)
H==
\\
==E=====S
Hand, Elbow,** S**houlder
Bah. Trying again with Preview this time.
.H===
…\
…====E=====S
Ignore the dots.
I saw a man get his pinky twisted about 180 degrees and the top third of it ripped clean off in an incident involving some underground construction.
Try it with the [ CODE ] [ /CODE ] tags. They preserve ASCII art.
Y’know, I gotta say, cat diarrhea isn’t all that gross to look at. Our cat got pretty severely ill a couple of years ago (including requiring two nights’ stay at the animal hospital), and the pools of diarrhea he left around the house (one of which my wife, um, stepped in in the dark) didn’t look all that nasty. Sort of like raspberry jam mixed with British “brown sauce.” I wouldn’t blink if I got served goo of this appearance over chicken in a restaurant.
No, it was the SOUL-PIERCINGLY PUTRID ODOR that made me flee to the bathroom with heaving spasms when I tried cleaning up one splash of the stuff. I still feel really bad that my wife ended up responsible for it, but there was no way I was going to be that close to it without making the mess, shall we say, a lot bigger.
When I came home after my year in college, I noticed a slight smell in my room. I couldn’t place it, though, so I put out some cedar and forgot about it. It got stronger and stronger, but I still couldn’t find a source for it. Finally it started getting cooler outside and I needed to get my winter clothes out of the closet. As soon as I opened the closet the stench was even worse. I opened the top drawer of my winter-clothes dresser and there was a mouse.
Well, a mouse’s skull.
The rest of the mouse had turned into a dark green liquid. All over my underwear and mittens.
Seeing the tip of my thumb get washed down the drain was pretty bad, too, but I think the worst part of that incident was seeing my coworker at the supermarket deli bag up the roast beef I had been cutting when the guard on the slicer failed. He was about to give it to the customer when I hollered out that I’d just chopped my thumb off all over that meat. I’m afraid I ruined a couple of customers’ appetites, but at least I didn’t accidentally promote semi-cannibalism. His defense was that he just thought it was especially rare roast beef.
When I was driving my cab in Austin one night, the guy in front of me at the 26th Street exit took out a bike rider. I had to stop and take care. The bike rider was still alive, but his brain was lying on the concrete.
He was still alive, and I put my coat over him. He was groaning, and I knew he really didn’t have a chance, but I called an ambulance.
It bummed me out when the dispatcher called to tell me EMS had declared him dead on the way to the hospital.
My fare at the time was a blind couple, whom I’d carried before. They were a fairly popular folk-duo in Austin at the time. They knew me and had to trust me through what was going on.
Well, anyway, brains of a, for the moment, still living person splattered on the pavement is my contribution.
My mother used to demo frozen pizzas at grocery stores. Once, she accidently sliced off the tip of one of her fingers. She didn’t realize it, and ended up serving it as a topping on one of the trial sized pizza pieces…which someone ate
I was standing on a dock while a crewboat was backing in stern-to. The boat was still ten feet from the dock when the captain’s Labrador retriever came running down the dock and tried to jump onto the deck of the boat.
He didn’t make it, and was sucked into the wheels before the captain could knock the throttles out of gear. Large chunks of dog floated to the surface.
It was actually more heartbreaking than gross.